Well to be honest with you, it's not a "War" it's a police action. In War you go in to kill people and break things. In general we do not do that in Iraq, we have our troops mostly riding around in hummers trying to maintain the peace while getting ambushed and killed. We do indeed retaliate with devestating effect in such situations, but even when we do, it results in the "enemy" whining to the media and doing more damage than they could have with weapons.
In general we simply don't fight wars like World War II anymore, we've simply lost the American spirit.
Think of it this way, when I talk about going down there and basically wiping the place out, people start screaming about the poor civilians and how even the insurgents have families and such. The anti-war crowd also has free access to say pretty much whatever they want, while the pro-war crowd (and military) is carefully kept quiet for a number of reasons.
In World War II we were smart enough NOT to embed reporters in our military units (a bid deal was made about this during this war), and we pretty much put a gag on anti-war media. There WAS a lot of anti-war sentiment, even while going on a LOT of people believed in isolationism even after Pearl Harbour. Those people simply had the rug pulled ou from under them and were not given a platform.
In addition we proceeded to demonize the Nazis in every way imaginable. That way our boys hated the enemy so much they were beyond caring if they have wives, or family, or whatever else. There is a whole section dedicated to World War II propaganda in the Smithsonian.
Trust me, things like the "human flesh lampshades" got going for a reason. Both before and afterwards (to justify our actions).
During World War II our troops lined up women, children, and the elderly and gunned them down ruthlessly. Why? Because of something called the "Vulkssturm" which pretty much demonstrated why in a REAL war there are no civilians. We also bombed their factories (full of civilians) out of existance to cripple ther infrastructure. We targeted things like food, water, and medical supplies to deprive the enemy of these things. Pressure on the civilians? Well if enough die or suffer the idea is that they will start to pressure their leadership (if all goes well) to do whatever the enemy wants so they can go back to living fairly normally. Especially if while your targeting them you bombard them with messages about how you just want their society to change, and will leave them alone if they do what you want.
That said, even today the Nazis are seen as being evil enough where in a FPS you can kick open the door of a church where a bunch of Nazis are hiding out, and kill everyone, and there is no real question about this. Do the same thing to a bunch of Iraqis in a Mosque and there are questions because really we haven't produced any pro-war propaganda.
Games like "Army Of Two" have gone here and have gotten criticism because we haven't been smart enough to really use emergency powers.
See if Bush had half a brain he would have basically declared martial law so he could use emergency powers while things were still "hot" from 9/11 and Afghanistan refusing to give us Bin Ladin. The first thing he should have done was pretty much put a gag on the media. Allow them to collect information, but not to broadcast anything that isn't pro-war until say a decade after the cessation of hostilities (this is why for example we know about American "atrocities" during WW II, but they aren't well known or popularized, pretty much we did everything that 'only the bad guys' do. That is why things like hard interrogation ARE standard operating procedure even if not acknowleged). Then he should have kicked the goverment into overdrive producing information about how evil Muslims are, how nice we had been for ignoring this so long, and taking the absolute worst things that they have ever done, extend them a bit, and then present them all together as a collage of what our enemy is like.
Then once this was done he would have forgotten "Shock and Awe" and simply went in and leveled any cities we could find with artillery and bombs, pumped poison gas over the ruins, and then sent in the armor and artillery to chase down the survivors and fleeing refugees for a bit of two-fisted American justice (ie having them dig their own graves before shooting them).
Groups like the "Hitler Youth" didn't just disappear, think about that when it comes to the techniques used during World War II.
Of course don't get me wrong here, Bush was a greedy bastage which is why he didn't do this. The entire purpose behind "winning the peace" was so that he could reach into the goverment's pockets and pay money out to the private sector for various contracts. Rebuilding, security, etc... all of that stuff was given to buddies of him and Cheney, no doubt in exchange for some nice kickbacks (ie we get you the contract and you secretly give us a percentage of the money back later as a thank you).
This is of course one of the big reasons why this turned into a police action. That and the general attitude that if we can somehow reform The Middle East, we can convince them to sell us oil exclusively should an East Vs. West war break out. Then we'll have the people of the region to defend their oil (which would be going to us and our allies) without having to put our own boots on the ground to try and defend it, when those soldiers would be needed elsewhere.
Really there IS some justification for not fighting the war the way it should have gone (similar to WW II), but I'm increasingly dissatisfied with the outcome especially seeing as this plan seems to have failed, and we should be looking at defanging/declawing the region at least before pulling out.
Basically we can't produce WW II style games because on one hand you have the anti-war movement going strong because of a lack of information control/propaganda. On the other hand if we're hoping these guys will become allies for a later conflict (uh-huh, yeah right, this failed utterly) producing "Muslim Killa: The Game" isn't going to go over too well.
Besides we "won" World War II, other conflicts since then have been police actions that we lost because in general we weren't simply moving to eliminate our enemy and/or the threat they pose and move on. We were trying to impose a degree of stability that we approve of.
>>>----Therumancer--->
